DIY Quick and easy Samba print server setup. Most DIYers assume a print server is a challenge to set up or is at least a costly endeavor. You could take a Windows XP or 7 box, slap a printer on it, and share the printer out to the company, but thats not a print server its just a desktop sharing out a printer, and it will not handle the print jobs necessary for anything more than a few users. If you want to serve up more than just a few documents, you want a server doing the job. Well be doing this with the help of Linux, Samba, and CUPS, so you wont need the hardware that would be required for a Windows Server 2. You wont be running a GUI on top of anything, so most likely you have the necessary hardware sitting around. For this tutorial, I will assume you already have a Linux box set up. Pdf995 is the fast, affordable way to create professionalquality documents in the popular PDF file format. Win 95, 98, 2000 and Me, NT 4. XP. Now we will go over how to add our newly setup Raspberry Pi print server to Windows. This should be a relatively easy process thanks to setting up SAMBA earlier in. A supplier of spare and production parts for commercial and military aviation. Lets use a Ubuntu Server platform to host our print server. You can use any flavor of Linux, but youll need to modify the instructions here to fit your needs. Its time to get down to work. ThinPrint/MC/en/2.2/MCe/Manual/windows-update-print-server-properties_arrow.png' alt='Terminal Server Easy Print Driver' title='Terminal Server Easy Print Driver' />Installing CUPSMost likely your server already has CUPS installed and running if not, this system is very easy to install. Open a terminal or just log in to the console and issue the command sudo apt get install cups. This should pick up all necessary dependencies, as well as some of the other important CUPS bits such as Gutenberg drivers. Installing Samba. With Samba, you should issue the command sudo apt get install samba. All dependencies should be picked up by that single command. Terminal Server Easy Print Driver' title='Terminal Server Easy Print Driver' />After the installation of both of the above tools, each daemon should already be started. For future reference, the starting of each can be done like so sudo service cups startsudo service samba start. Now well begin the actual setup of both of these services. CUPS setup. If youre working on a graphic desktop, you probably have a handy GUI tool to use to add your printer. Audio Solutions. TIs easytouse Automotive Audio portfolio delivers topoftheline audio quality, bestinclass EMI performance and high reliability with fully. How to fix Event id 1111 TermServDevices printers not mapping in terminal server issue Roger 07052010 at 555 am. Except that this doesnt. During a new driver install, or when changing the driver version of an installed HP UPD printer, you can select either the versionspecific option for example HP. Things you can do to make your Terminal Server environment more secure. Virtual Printer Driver, PDF virtual printer, TIFF virtual printer, JPG virtual printer, PNG virtual printer, EMF virtual printer. With Windows 2008 Microsoft introduce new way of printer mapping called Easy print, as the name implies this makes terminal session printing really easy. If youre on a console only or headless server, you use the CUPS web based administration tool. With this tool, you can easily add a new printer to you server. To access this tool, point a web browser to http ADDRESSTOPRINTSERVER 6. Once youre on that page Figure A, click the Add Printer button under Printers. Figure AYou can manage every aspect of a CUPS server from this location. After you complete the steps in Print Add wizard, make sure to run a test print to ensure the printer is actually printing otherwise, the work you will do with Samba will be in vain. Samba setup. Now we get into the nuts and bolts of setting up your print server. Believe it or not, unless youre really getting into a complex print server, configuring Samba to serve up your printers isnt difficult. Heres how to share out printers so everyone can use them. First, open the etcsambasmb. Once the file is open, look for these two sections printerscomment All Printersbrowseable nopath varspoolsambaprintable yesguest ok noread only yescreate mask 0. Printer Driverspath varlibsambaprintersbrowseable yesread only yesguest ok no. The first section is the basic entry for sharing out printers with Samba. Lets break this down printers Name of the directive. All Printers The human readable comment. This controls whether this share is seen in the list of available shares in a net view and in the browse list. Set this to yes so users can see the listed printers. Path to the printer spool. Set to yes to allow users to print. Set to yes to allow guest users anyone to print to the printer. If set to no users will be able to create and modify files in the services directory. How the create file permissions are handled. For a print server that is going to allow all users guests to print to the configured CUPS printers, the only thing you would need to change in the above section is the browseable and guest ok entries. The second print section shown below should include any necessary Windows drivers for downloading to clients. Printer Driverspath varlibsambaprintersbrowseable yesread only yesguest ok no. The above section should be fine as is, but there might be one issue depending upon your setup You have to copy all driver files into the directory configured above in the sample its varlibsambaprinters. If you dont set guest ok to yes, users may have to have a Samba username and password in order gain access to the necessary files. If you cannot open that directory to everyone by setting guest ok to yes, you might have to add users to Samba using the smbpasswd tool. If you have a lot of users, it might be best to open the floodgates. You can be safe and house those files in a location such as optprintdrivers and then set guest ok to yes. After you make the changes in the smb. Samba with the command sudo service samba restart. Now you should be serving up all printers attached to the printer server with the help of hardware you probably already had sitting around. Advantages of Terminal Server instead of normal client Server installation We used both environments were a public school system, and when I started here we were running several terminal servers for teachers and students, and now were fat clients and role specific servers no terminal servers for users. Treasure Hunt Games. Pros centralized management. When you have two or three people overseeing a huge number of users with a significant portion online at any time, it is fantastic to be able to install a necessary desktop shortcut or install a program a few times and have it instantly available to all the users rather than rely on automated package installers or AD to hopefully roll out the change to desktops. I know people talk about how wonderful AD is at installing MSIs, or how XYZ can solve this installation issue, but weve had plenty of cases where for one reason or another the installation failed or didnt work properly and we had to clean up the mess by hand or just install the thing manually at each workstation. Not. Fun. Instant troubleshooting. We were able to check a users session easily and quickly when a call came in. Yes, remote desktop software can do this and we use it. But on the terminal servers, you have a small pool of machines, not a desktop that was tweaked or altered with XYZ programs that you didnt know where changed by another tech or it was changed and the records are lost or never kept. Tight adherence to policies and record keeping can do this. Reality is, at least in public school systems I know of, this isnt followed very often. You have fewer machines to back up and monitor. Desktops are easily swapped and can be run on the cheap. All you need is a thin client or a system capable of running terminal service client hardly need a gig of ram and a hundred gig hard drive for that. We were running PII and PIII systems with barely enough RAM to run Windows 9. Monitoring users was simpler. Not really big brother monitoring unless you wanted to take it to extreme, but when users were suspected of violating the AUP or their sessions were showing unusual activity, it was easy to pop in and check what was happening running an exe youre not supposed to Why is the web filter showing odd activity for your session hereSometimes it was just a call from a teacher saying Johnny was acting suspicious and minimizing something while in classUpgrade a server and a large number of users benefit, all at once Cons You have twenty users on a system. System reboots, dies, hardware issue. And users dont understand terminals to begin with. They dont care why somethings weird. They just know something isnt working. One switch goes wonky or one server goes wonky and youve taken out a large number of users. Load balancing creates issues. If user is on machine A, and machine A or network connection to A goes down, they may log in and get machine B. Their session was still on A, and they wonder why they now dont have their Word document they were working on, but its in their home directory and its showing up as open or locked. Whoops. Resource hogging. Can be handled with quota management on resources, but we had cases in early versions Win. Half an hour later the machine is CRAWWWWWLING. Memory was leaked from the flash movie animation, hogging RAM and leaving us with no choice but to kill the session. Some programs do NOT like terminal services. Hopefully it improved, but a big one was Office. You had to install it with a special terminal services mode, or the installation would act really weird or not function properly. Other programs just acted strange. Windows was NOT designed to act as a multiuser platform it was meant to support multiple users asynchronously at a workstation this workstation allows any number of users to use it at different times, unlike UNIX workstations that have their design roots in timeshare systems a workstation youre sitting at can be running with another ten or fifteen users using SSH or remote X terms and youd barely be aware of it unless they were hogging a resource. This could easily get to be a technoreligious argument, but the fact is that because of the organic growth in Windows architecture, there are many developers that take shortcuts and older software simply acts. Windows Term services. I think that issue has definitely improved as MS has started forcing people to adhere to design recommendations. Need to reboot a server or perform maintenance Again, you have one machine going down, it takes everyone out. You need a reliable network infrastructure to work. The users need a good path from desktop to the server. If the client machine died, a switch, a cable, a server. With fat clients, you could potentially have a server failure and users could still do something else i. Most businesses wouldnt have to worry about it, but if you have cheap shovelware think kids edutainment titles, it doesnt take much to bring even a powerful server to its knees. Printer drivers acted strange at times. Interaction among software increases the chance of glitches. Especially with terminal servers. Gothic 3 Pc Game. But maybe Im being paranoid. Remember one server affecting everyone Well, one bad software install can cause headaches for everyone. There is a layer of complexity added. You brought up USB, maybe things like sound, etc. I think was improved since our time. But it still means another place where things can go wrong, and its not like sitting down at a fat client to troubleshoot. Youre trying to redirect stuff over the network on a server that is dealing with connections from another dozen users. Weird stuff happens. In IT, complexity is bad to intentionally introduce. Overall terminal services are cheaper, despite the CALs necessary for licensing. Your systems scattered around are cheaper, you can manage more users with fewer people, and you invest in your servers and network infrastructure, not necessarily giving the CEO a 2,0. But theyre only cheaper if youre running in an environment that is suited for terminal services. If your users are running Office apps, browsing the web, email. If theyre running specialized stuff, test the out of it first, making sure its compatible, that there arent file locking or sharing issues or even display issues print drivers were horrible at times if you did something that managed to get printer monitors running and they got confused to which display was actually being viewed, but its not just those applications that hated the idea of multiuser hacks. We had to move because over time we were getting more and more people that HAD to have something they wanted installed but other people didnt, and for licensing it could only be used by a small group of people. Or the software was made with Macromedia Director ugh and didnt quite work right refresh was off with graphics, animations were choppy. Or we had people running software that was just bloated and bogged down servers. Or we had people that had to use CDs for a presentation or material and they couldnt access them via the terminals again, may have improved. Eventually we were putting in special workstations for certain tasks log in once to run Photoshop, use the terminal shortcut to get to Office. XYZ and terminals to support ABC. We had too many diverse needs. Thats my experience with them. Theyre great for certain tasks.